Many wireless networks (such as wireless local area networks or WLANs), rely on infrastructure devices that establish data communication links with user devices (e.g., mobile devices and/or other wireless devices). These user devices communicate, via a wireless data communication channel, with a wireless access device (such as an access point or access port device), which in turn communicates with other network components via traditional wired interfaces. These wireless access devices generally communicate with the mobile and/or wireless devices using one or more RF channels (e.g., in accordance with one or more of the IEEE 802.11 standards).
Generally, in multicast wireless networks, the communications from a wireless access device to one or more downstream user devices are inherently unreliable as there are no default mechanisms for determining whether the transmitted data has reached the appropriate destination(s) (e.g., link level acknowledgement of received and/or lost data). This results and random data loss, which adversely affects the user experience. For example, in the case of video data which is encoded into video frames where some of the video frames reference other frames for decoding purposes, even relatively few lost frames results in an incorrect video data stream, which in turn, leads to improper decoding of the video data. As a result, the decoded video data being viewed by a user may freeze or otherwise exhibit degraded picture quality (e.g., tiling and/or scrambling). In addition, the available output bandwidth of the wireless access device may be less than the data rate of the video data, which leads to additional data loss and further exacerbates the problem.